Inside the Star

A literary portrait of a marriage

The humourist Calvin Trillin didn't think he was writing about marriage when he composed his new book, About Alice. It was to be a portrait of his late wife and muse, who died at 63 of heart failure on Sept. 11, 2001.

The humourist Calvin Trillin didn't think he was writing about marriage when he composed his new book, About Alice. It was to be a portrait of his late wife and muse, who died at 63 of heart failure on Sept. 11, 2001.

"For a long time I had no plans to write about her," he says. After her death, he published a novel about a man obsessed with parking (Tepper Isn't Going Out), a collection of articles about food (Feeding a Yen), and two volumes of light verse about the Bush administration, bringing his published books to 24.

"Then David Remnick (editor of The New Yorker, where Trillin has been a staff writer wince 1963) asked rather hesitantly if I'd thought of writing about Alice. And I realized that I wanted to recreate her as a whole person, not the sitcom sensible mom figure that I wrote about in my lighter pieces."

Readers of Trillin's books such as Alice, Let's Eat; Family Man and Travels With Alice had known her as the straight man, advising moderation to his own flakey and gluttonous persona.

The fizz in their relationship, their pleasure in each other's company, was in constant evidence in Trillin's portrait of Alice, whom he met at a party in the early 1960s. She married him because he made her laugh; he wrote all his subsequent work to impress and entertain her: his first and best reader.

After The New Yorker article appeared in March 2006, Trillin recalls receiving "a lot of letters from young women about marriage. I didn't mean to be writing about marriage, but I guess that came through."

Letter writers wanted to know how to have a marriage as happy as the Trillins'.

Marriage has fallen into disrepute, brought low by Philip Roth and Claire Bloom, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and a host of narcissists and philanderers. According to recent reports, the proportion of unmarried people is at an all-time high in the United States.

The author was in Toronto from his Manhattan home to read at Harbourfront last night from About Alice, a slightly expanded version of The New Yorker article. We talked in the office of Random House Canada, his publisher.

Trillin is a compact man with a fringe of dark hair around a bald spot, dressed with L.L Bean-like informality in khakis and a blue V-neck sweater over a checked shirt. Like most funny writers, he is deadly serious in person.

The son of a Kansas City Jewish grocer, Trillin was educated at Yale and worked at Time magazine in his early days, an experience captured in his first novel Floater. A Time colleague, the writer John Gregory Dunne, became a close friend.

Unlike A Year of Magical Thinking, the memoir by Dunne's widow Joan Didion (soon to open as a Broadway play), About Alice is not sad.

"Joan's book is about mourning and mine isn't," he says. His is an upbeat story about the 25 extra years he had with his wife, an educator, TV producer, fashion plate and generous friend to all.

Though never a smoker, Alice was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 38 when their two daughters, Abigail and Sarah, were small. The aggressive radiation treatment that saved her life eventually led to fatal heart damage.

Alice was also exceptionally beautiful, as the photo on the book's jacket, taken in London on their wedding day, shows. Why were they married abroad?

"I had a friend who arranged a trip for us to London; Alice was there visiting someone and we decided it would be easier to get married there because by then her parents were fragile financially. She didn't want them to have to pay for a wedding."

The picture was taken by a newspaper photographer assigned to see if any couples were brave enough to get married on Friday the 13th, which it happened to be.

Alice died on 9/11, but Trillin ignores this coincidence in his 78-page book. "It was a nightmare logistically; everyone in New York was traumatized," he says. "I didn't want to attach myself to the historical event. It would have been a faux drama."

He dwells most on the good times, like the summers spent at the family cottage on the south shore of Nova Scotia, which Trillin continues to own.

"My girls grew up there. I've been arguing for years that I should be considered one-sixth Canadian content since I live here two months a year, but I still don't find myself on the Canadiana shelf in bookstores," he says.

Sarah and Abigail brought their prospective husbands to the cottage to see if they passed the Nova Scotia test. Guests were required to try out a gizmo from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue that was supposed to enable one to walk on water.

"We called it the Jesus toy; most people fell into the water. How gracefully you met defeat was the test."

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